Krysia Jopek

The book said, I wanted to save you.

The dream offered an angel draped in northern lights.

The subject still couldn’t get out of bed.

Something had crashed on the shore.

I couldn’t touch you because I froze.

Words lie down, tired beggars, golden Tarot cards—all blank.

It would be awkward to let the trapeze artist go.

Flaunting the abyss didn’t fill sinkholes.

The think tank for thinking tanked.

The beloved was already betrothed.

The old woman took her dreams and let them out the window.

The cold took the skeleton for its own stolen music.

Nothing hours are blanched and unholy.

The subject homesick for somewhere it’s never been.

Meaning confuses purpose to bow and sit down.

The books are far away from the crime scene.

Stones and winter stories are empty and dull.

A mourning dove asleep on the empty birdfeeder.

The old woman walks around the house four times in the morning.

I catch her in my night dreams in another house.

This must be temporary.

Snow dusting birds and light collecting sound.

The dream was lost inside the book without any even pages.

Beholden, we were packing our suitcases with sentences that might describe us as silly or brave.

Then the travel to the Northern Lights in Alaska or Iceland, a volcano on Santorini, nightfall in Japan.

The subject of one story flooded with a sunset somewhere lost from the atlas on the card table until much later.

Then awakening with the taste of metal and memories of missing the train, forgetting the dog.

The beloved left on a different island in love with change.

Invisible ladder rungs might line the trees, call to the subject who misplaced the horizon for the abyss.

We sent a lifeline, a postcard from somewhere beautiful, a pretend hand grenade.

Climb out, someone needs you to pull the kite down from the soon-obsolete telephone lines.

To tell a story about the dream that winds the subject into a new poem.

About how the day asked for forgiveness, how the hour required hands.

Let’s say bring the book with you, the spiderweb photo album, the last rock of Turkish candy dissolving in your throat while the sun hides behind your complicated torso.

No one has to know.

Pack the travel guide for Iceland and Italy, your most remarkable shoes, your notecards of love’s embellishments, your compromised iPhone, queue of films to see in the event of a falling out, shows to binge, items to purchase on Amazon.

Wave at the neighbor while letting the dog out, prune the syringa that survived five heat waves, studly the striped Monarch caterpillars chomping at milkweed poisonous to predators.

The bucket list, vertical—your happy list horizontal.

On the refrigerator, in the borrowed car with broken windows, in your head before your ducks are dead, in your wallet with your new debit card in your left back jeans’ pocket.

In your good ear, your collapsed lung, in your ribcage, stomach plummet, litany for possible wingspans.

Someone is watching you.

You should sing the grocery list, memorize the steps down the winding staircase to nowhere certain–nowhere in particular.

Again, the book empty—betrayed.

The dream leaves for other lands decorated with streetlights and one-way traffic signs.

The hip said, I’m sorry for my elegy.

The dog knows the horizon is a straight line, where the coyote live.

To talk of The Lost City didn’t bring anyone back.

The window of empathy may have expired—the broken Robin’s egg edging the driveway.

The book said, pack your rusted suitcase.

Though these revolving-door scenes may be an ensemble piece—

you’ll be alone.

The sun feels holy, she said.

Take it with you–September garden light to soften chaos.

We could swim to Japan.

We could move the ether with blindness.

The subject of the study said, what will save me?

The surgeon’s cut is angry—pushing new skin under shiny staples.

The brain says, you should type a way out of The Sleeping City, this town that doesn’t even know you.

The father tells the daughter, your doll won’t grow back mermaid wings.

We’ll bury her shoulders.

We’ll buy you a dog or cat.

Everyone knows the checkbook balances out in the wash.

Everyone knows autumn falls down with a crash.

The book said, let the dream take us—

away from the pain, the incision.

Radiant cutout stars said—we’ll go, too.

There are other people in the world though most stay away—

not knowing what to say.

We’ll ride the swings of youth over the mountains of clarity.

We’ll curl up with our mothers in the sun of car windows—

before we knew, they suffer, too.

The book said, it’s okay to be unreasonable.

The dream said, it’s okay to cartwheel out of your skin.

Some may know about the horses behind the rotting barn.

That the poem looked in the mirror and found you.

There’s a poem sleeping in September light, but sleep doesn’t bring it.

Inner layering collects last week into alphabetized envelopes.

After little rain for 7 weeks, the cut grass has lost its emerald sheen.

Time, stubborn, pulls at Monarch wings.

The field, outstretched, hinges mauve with sage and heather without airplane turbulence.

The neighborhood bear wrestles garages, a hibernation prelude.

Blankets are added to keep dreams under the yawning windows.

Crickets are learning to leave their violins.

The dream said, I need you.

Shut your green, dry eyes.

We can be happy.

We can leave those proliferating metal doors, your elegant process, behind.

We can climb the mountains lodged in your brain with miniature goats and baby camels.

Love isn’t supposed to hurt you.

I’ll love you like the divine.

I’ll wine and dine you with the fanciest champagne or absinthe, if you prefer.

We can forget the day together.

We can defy the universe with one-way parking lots and childhood banisters and stairs.

God is Time, the dream said.

God is your reflection in a paper cup.

Do your due diligence, and we can go home.

The book told the question it was in the wrong book.

I’m a scholar of nonsense.

The dream said, you’re asking the wrong question.

I deconstructed the couch.

Sit in the garden and regale me with stories of happiness and magical birds.

Summer folds its pages of garden light into miniature phosphorescent swans.

The cardinal nests between your vertebrae—resting before winter and frozen birdbaths.

There would be invitations to Celtic ceremonies, holy stones—before the catbird leaves.

The Monarch is a semicolon.

I didn’t weed enough—I tried to explain, compete with myself.

The invitation arrived, but it wasn’t addressed to me.

You misplaced the tempo in sleep and couldn’t resurrect accordingly, he said.

We’ve made adjustments to your hard drive to bypass the dearth of manifesto.

Your spiritual stenosis might entail surgery.

The book said, you need me.

You lost the passcode to yourself.

There’s no flowchart for teal and orange feelings.

Art is an emergency—memories of poems stuck in poplar trees.

We were supposed to be happy on page 11.

Dread was a horrible neighbor.

Love couldn’t always teach how to love.

Take your oxygen first before trying to save another who might arrive in time.

If the tree falls on your car, someone might find you.

Sometimes it’s required to play dead to become whole again—

before receding into someone else’s daydream without receipt.

Summer seemed a wash even without enough rain.

I implored the dog to get better.

My idiosyncrasies were proliferating until I became fractals at the dream’s shoreline.

I broke the kaleidoscope with my greedy hands.

The black bear ate all the bird food in the garage but dreamed of fish in the river.

The book of questions burned through the night.

When the priestess arrives, she’ll say—it’s not too soon.

The book said, your dreams are safe here.

There are four exits to eternity’s wingspan.

The old woman’s dreams fit in her wardrobe.

She recognizes you but wants to let go.

The book says, doors may proliferate even if hinges are rusted from decades of rain.

Invented childhoods might merge with old age.

The old woman recognizes your voice when you whisper or scream.

The sloped stairs are windows to a pristine sphere.

The book says, I can offer you lifelines when you’ve forgotten how to return.

AI can’t create chaos that sings.

Chance said, you must follow past the abandoned garden that harbors enough light for night travel.

Follow the golden threads without looking at your feet to wake the dreamer.

I’ve heard you at night harvesting stars from the ceiling.